Senior Living: How the Trailer Park Could Save Us All

A healthy, inexpensive, environmentally-friendly senior living solution for housing millions of retiring baby boomers is staring us in the face: time to rethink the trailer park.

Notoriously underloved, manufactured-homes can provide organic communities and a lifestyle that is healthy, affordable, and green, and not incidentally, fun. But in order to really see their charms, we need to change a mix of bad policies and prejudice.

Photo By Arnaldo Abba Legnazzi

Baby boomers aren’t going to retire the way their parents did. They are poorer and more likely to live alone. They can’t depend on pensions, and the real-estate bubble destroyed almost 50 percent of their wealth.

Photo By Arnaldo Abba Legnazzi

If you are attending the late-afternoon cocktail session on the porch of Space 329, bring your own can, bottle, or box to drink. If you are fighting with other residents, you still have to greet them when you run into them. Make your peace with the words ‘trailer trash.’